Run Android 5.1 Lollipop Exton build on Raspberry Pi 2

NEWS 150405I have compiled an Android 5.1 Lollipop system which can run on Raspberry Pi 2. I call “my” new system RaspAnd.
What is Raspberry Pi?The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. It’s capable of doing everything you’d expect a desktop computer to do, from browsing the internet and playing high-definition video, to making spreadsheets, word-processing, and playing games.Read more about Raspberry Pi…

Raspberry Pi model B made in February 2015. It has a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU and 1GB RAM. Read more…

How do I install RaspAnd?
Almost like any other Raspberry system. The installation has to take place in Linux though. (From hard drive or while running a live Linux system from cd or a USB stick). Follow this instruction. The whole thing has to be done exactly like this.1. Unpack the download Zip-file (unzip raspex-arm-android-lollipop-5.1-134mb-150405.zip). You will get the folder raspex-android-arm-lollipop-5.1 with the folder boot and the system file system.img2. Create four partitions of/on your Micro SD Card with Fdisk or GParted.
a) Part 1 for BOOT of 512 MB ; format as fat32 ; flag as boot
b) Part 2 for /system of 512 MB; any filesystem
c) Part 3 for /cache of 512 MB ; format as ext4
d) Part 4 for /data; size the remain; format as ext4
When you are done with partitioning it shall look like this.3. Now open up a terminal as root and run this command (make sure which name your SD card was given when you inserted it (/dev/sdb2 or /dev/sdc2 or as in the example here /dev/sdd2):dd if=system.img of=/dev/sdd2 bs=1M4. Then just copy every file in raspex-android-arm-lollipop-5.1/boot (8 files) to /dev/sdd1. If not mounted already you can mount it with mkdir /mnt/sdd1 followed by mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/sdd1

Note: You shall not do anything with /dev/sdd3 and /dev/sdd4. I.e: Do not create folders /cache or /data.

Booting up RaspAnd – Slide show
Now just place your SD Card in your Raspberry Pi 2 machine and turn on the power. Watch this Slide show.

Just downloaded (and bought) the Android for RPi2.
I also had to buy usb SDHC dongle (internal SD slot reader was not working in gparted.live), but anyway… I am almost clean Windows user so this is what I did in windows to do your steps as well:
1) download tuxboot and gparted.live – see http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php for details
2) format regular flash drive with tuxboot and put there gpartedl.live image.
3) copy the extracted files from your zip to the flash drive as well (created my own directory)
4) boot from the flashdrive, insert the usb-sdhc dongle, open GParted, do your steps with formatting the SDHC card partitions
5) in terminal find the files I copied do the flashdrive. They were in /lib/live/mount/
6) do the dd command as you instructed with sudo
7) copy the files from /boot to sdd1 partition
8) shutdown, unplug, plug to RPi2 and ta-daaaa… screen showing that I need 1280×1024 monitor at least … nice 😉

Later I could see that the Android has booted up. Nice! It’s a bit slower, but we will see.

Hi! I had intalled RaspAnd and i have a doubt. When i’m triying to run some apps, for example chrome, Firefox, etc it suddenly stops and appears a notification of closing. How can i install most common apps?
Thanks a lot 🙂

Hi guys,
i did some testing and from the beginning the Lollipop on RPi2 is unusable. System is rather slow, sometimes unresponsive, sometimes so slow that it pops questons if it should wait or close the slow app.
I would call this dead-end street.
Perhaps some older version of the Android would be more suitable, especially with working GooglePlay store. Any (tested) suggestions?

Hi,
It s a really good job. I have 3 questions :
– I can’t find the switch off to turn off. I tried Esc but it doesn’t work. How can turn off my raspberry pi ?
– I woukd like to install French keyboard. Is it possible and how ?
I would like to install french language. Is it possible and how ?

Hi, Exton
I’d like install GAPPS to RaspAnd on Raspberry pi2. But I am not sure how can I do it.
Could you kindly tell me how to install it?
If it is impossible to do, could you tell me alternative way to install Play Store, Chrome, Gmail etc?

Is there any way to achieve the following?
1. Run Android on the R-Pi without a GUI, but with a set of speakers and a mic,
2. Be able to run the Voice recognition engine as the default and only application,
3. Be able to use the above setup to communicate with Google Now via voice.

I’m confused isn’t Android Open Source and as such it illegal to sale it? I understand you have to spend time on it and everything. but making a clear profit from a piece of software you don’t own is risky to say the least. Also you copied someone elses work to get this far, so how much of the cost is going to fund the work they did for you? There is a reason you don’t sale content you didn’t create.

It is not illegal to sell open source, as long as you provide the sources.
You can always provide work that others are too lazy to do, for example to provide a working Android release, which currently, nobody else has done.
So I don’t mind that he charges money for it and 9 bucks is not crazy much money.
I think it is a dangerous and wrong assumption that opensource has to be always free, that no effort can ever be rewarded, it takes away all incentive to do any work. Darktable is a great example: The makers didn’t want to release it on Windows, because they were faced with a complaining ungrateful mob, nobody that would contribute, but just leech software and then complain that there are bugs, that no everything is perfect, even though they got it for free.
When I look though these comments, I’m shocked of how clueless and (tech) dumb (sorry the term, but this is how it seems to me) people are. I have noticed that in Android forums before: most use it, but have no clue how it works and then are totally 100% helpless and useless when they get problems with it. Not the highly trained, highly knowledgeable and powerful Linux users you meet in forums, people that know how their OS works or are ready to learn.
The ease of use, all the GUI stuff seems to dumb people down or attract people that could never use anything more complex than a Mac, or a Windows system.
Talking about Windows: I have noticed the same on there: in forums, 99% of all people ask questions, are clueless, while only 1% has any answers and sometimes, the dumbness of the answers are staggering:
“did you update the graphics driver?”, “did you restart?”
“did you open port 5134 on the firewall?” for totally unrelated problems, that have ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOTHING TO DO with either GPU, or firewall.
But that is what the heard somewhere and so they just parrot it.

Anyway, I’m rambling.
It seems to me that no port of Android can work, without hardware acceleration, so without the GPU working, no games, no video, no nothing can work, because it will be too slow. Android has a timer built in, that will ask you to terminate apps if they are extremely slow to respond. that does not mean they are crashing, but Android thinks they are, because they normally could never be this slow.
We got the opensource drivers for Vidcore IV some time ago, so we should be able to get hardware acceleration some day.

I have two questions:
How can I mount an USB Memory Stick in this Android System?
How can I connect The Pi over USB with a Windows PC for Development purpose? Do I need to install drivers on Windows side?
Thank you

To my question about mounting of USB Stick:
In which folder I can find the USB Stick? I can not find a FAT32 or NTFS formated device. I expected that I have to mount the device manually similar to Rasbian. So I tryed the StickMount application but this application does not detect any USB stick. Do I need firstly to install additional drivers?

Are you able to connect Pi 2 with a Linux Development PC using Android Debug Bridge? I assume that I need for this purpose also an additional driver on the Ri 2.

I do not mind spending $9.00 but, I am still very disappointed. Google play should be installed, but worse yet, even when I go to google play on the browser I cannot install software from google play. When I installed google chrome from aptoide I am not sure what I get but it is not aptoide. There also needs to be a way to set screen resolution – it defaults to 1280 x something; there are also issues with rotation.

There also needs to be the standard android icons on the screen unless my sony xperia ultra is unusual, I expected notifications on the top and icons on the bottom.

I get that the ESC key is used for the back functionality, but is there a way to get the back arrow buttons to work in the top left of most screens? Or maybe some type of floating home button app to get back to the main screen? I ask because I’m trying to use touchscreen without a keyboard.

I am failing to get it installed in Windows. I used MiniTool Partition Wizard to create the four partitions. Then i start Paragon to be able to see the ext4 partitions in Windows. Ans last i open Win32DiskImager to load the system.img to the second partition, but Win32DiskImager gives me a few errors on startup and i am not able to select the ext4 partitions.
Anyone know another program to load an image to ext4 for Windows?

Windows is too dumb to be able to understand anything else than NTFS, sadly. This problem has now existed over 20 years and Microsoft has no plans to change that.
In many ways, Windows is very limited and many of us have switched over to Linux for all the freedom that it affords us.
There are drivers for Windows that can read Ext file systems, but they are totally aweful bad, again, because Windows does not support any other file systems and is not modular in that way. Linux on the other hand probably supports about 20 of them.
I also don’t know a good partition manager for Windows, the one that everybody uses is called parted (or gparted), which usually comes in a bootable CD / usb image, that runs… that provides a little Linux OS.

I would probably think that Android does not know what to do with your USB Bluetooth. If Android were Linux, that would not be a problem, Linux automatically installs and uses drivers, even easier and faster than Windows does (where you get to wait endlessly while a driver is installed)
But Android is a butchered and messed up Linux, so it is not modular any more, the changed the whole driver system, throwing overboard what worked so well. Bluetooth is built into every Android smart phone, so they probably don’t see any need to have a driver for stuff like USB dongles. I’m afraid that it might be hard to impossible to get this working.
I’m not an expert in Android drivers, so (hopefully) I might be wrong about this.

I’m not sure about that, but the screen resolution can be changed by editing the file config.txt on the boot partition.
If you open config.txt you will see these two lines
framebuffer_width=1280
framebuffer_height=720

where to find someone to do this for me. I would pay for the card and it to be done. seen you can buy some cards preloaded on it on the store but not android 5.1. I only have a tablet no pc to do the above. I can easy go to micro center to buy a raspberry pi 2.

I installed the Raspand recently and was using the HDMI outpu.
I have bought the official RPi 7” screen and installed it. But it is not working with Raspand. Do you know how to enable image output to the screen? Thanks.

1. What about LOWERING the resolution to something like 800×600 or 1024×768? Is it still ‘slow’? I’ve seen the comments on INCREASING the resolution, but if the reports of this being ‘slow’ are to be believed, why not recommend lowering the resolution?

2. If you want to use different languages, you need to include the languages in the distro to begin with. They do not magically appear out of thin air because you made a selection in Settings.

3. Is there a page listing what is known to work and what is not known to work?

4. If I had a Pi with SATA… could I install this OS to a physical hard drive and build my own ‘android laptop’ around this?

5. Haven’t really dug around yet… are there any videos of this in action? in use?

6. The download page claims Play Store has been added… where’s the posting about these changes?

Would this run on a raspberry pi zero?
I’m looking to run a single app on the pi, – its called xdrip and is used to control a device that hacks the signal from a type one diabetic’s continuous blood glucose meter. ( to send it to a smartwatch) At the moment it needs an android phone to control the device, I was hoping to install android kitkat or lollipop to a Rpi zero at not to need the phone.
Would your RaspAnd work for this?